how to control warping audio length in MPC Software?

I haven't been using the MPC software for months now, but loaded it up because I wanted to use the higher quality warping, for changing some loops by extreme amounts.

If I go to sample edit, and detect bpm, that works. So it knows the original bpm. Then in the audio track, I click warp, and instead of stretching my audio to the nearest bar, it stretches to the nearest beat - so it it might stretch to be 3 beats long at the new tempo - not the whole bar.

How do I tell it that the original is 4 beats?

I asked for that the minute the warping beta pics were released. Nothing has happened since 2.0

Maybe 3.0 we’ll get warp markers.

So, it appears that if you go to the sample edit screen for the audio in the audio track, then do a manual time-stretch, you get the option to tell it how many beats your sample is. But you can't just hit "detect bpm", you have to actually proceed with the timestrech.

So you do a manual timestretch - to any BMP you like - doesn't matter. Then when you turn on warp, it will stick to the proper number of beats. You can change the BMP as much as you like after that.

Very strange and unintuitive.
I have a vague memory that a year ago, it didn't work this way.

Although - I noticed tonight, that longer samples are hard to work with. I can tell the MPC that it's 8 bars, but it can't figure out the BPM, even though it should be able to calculate this based on sample length, not actual beats.

Their tempo detection took me awhile to figure out and its really lame on its own. It assumes everything youre working with is a 2 bar or 8 beat loop, if youre sample was long enough you probably went past its tempo limit hah. Thats why the Time Stretch defaults to 8 beats, apparently were all supposed to be working strictly with 8 beat samples. They left no way to configure it, and the manual mentions nothing about it. You would think it just magically works until it tells you a 100bpm loop youre working on is only 25bpm or something. It makes it really hard to do anything unless you stick to 2 bar loops or just one shots so thats the only time I use any of that stuff heh. If I have to Ill just do it in Audiofinder or even Logic and load the finished sample into the MPC. Ive gotten good results with Time Stretch but its usually when I stick to 1 or 2 bar loops. When Ive tried to do it with anything longer, the results never come out right and the math somehow never works right.

Recycle had it right. You didnt even get a tempo and none of the functions activated until you told it how many bars/beats your audio file was.

Recycle probably works like the Octatrack, where once it knows how many beats you say your sample is, it can calculate the tempo by the sample length. No attempt at beat detection. I prefer that, if I want to look at 'beats' lining up, I will slice the sample - but for drones or other elements that I want smooth - I want the device to just do the math and give me the seamless loop I created in my DAW.

Yeah thats exactly what it does hehe. When you load up an audio file in it, all the controls and everything are greyed out. You cant touch or do anything pretty much until you either tell it how many beats it is (and it does exactly what you say) or I think you can flat out tell it "This is 160bpm". Then all of a sudden you have access to all its slicing tools and whatnot heh.

The time stretch stuff was so frustrating because the manual doesn't go into detail about how any of the stuff in the MPC actually works. Its literally a set of stereo instructions with no clue as to what youre actually doing when you do use a function.